Using technology to assist the artist...

venus (2011), a photo by kelise72 on Flickr.

Here is a painting (from a set of 5) that is slated for my year-end assessment. (60 x 60 cm, oil on canvas).

For all the readings that can be made of this piece (it's about emotion, colour, faces, self-portrait or what-have-you), I think there's something just a little more that can be said... and it's about HOW the painting arrived to THIS particular point that interests me the most...

First of all, it *is* a self-portrait, of sorts. I took a photo of my own face as seen pressed up against a pane of glass... then I worked out the shapes and colours I wanted in my sketchbook... and finally sketched the shapes on a primed canvas, mixed up oil colours, applied paint to canvas with various brushes. And away I went, pretty normal stuff so far.

But after a couple of days, something wasn't quite working with the colours yet I felt near to the "done"...

I wasn't sure what to do next so I stepped back and I took a photo of the progress of the painting with the same camera phone as used for the original source photo, loaded up the photo in a little phone app called "Scribble" and tried various combinations of colours and lines... until I found something that WORKED.

Back to the canvas, mix up the new colour and in one more session I was DONE.

I think I found a new way of working that really WORKS when I'm "stuck". The final piece will be more-or-less "traditional" painting on canvas but getting there with a technological short-cut or two.

Hooray for Sony Ericsson Satio and Scribble! Thanks for the helping hand!